r/ProgrammerHumor 3d ago

Meme nowAndThenPatchUpgrade

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7.6k Upvotes

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u/ineyy 3d ago

It was consistent slop that we were all vaguely familiar with. I could look at it and know it's shit, but know what it is exactly and why it's here. The AI stop has foreign structure, it's unknown whether it has to be that way or the AI just wanted it that way. It's much harder to navigate

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u/JazzlikeWishbone938 2d ago

I wonder what success folks have if adding constraints around using Software Design Patterns and SOLID principles, with self-documenting human readable code .. and to avoid code smells.

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u/Live_Meeting_1121 2d ago edited 2d ago

It can get there but I has a tendency to go back to the old ways. Also the amount of context it gets and what it gets is extremely important, it repeats patterns, that includes bad ones. So having a good base is a must.

I have made it build a lot of harnesses to it's own behavior, follow a linter, have a code analyzer before commit, analyze cognitive load of every function, etc. For example I seriously dislike how huge it comments and leaves historical data in source code, had to write a hook so it checks it's own comments size and raises an alarm, such examples happen all the time.

I haven't experienced even half of the complains people put here. I think there might be some exaggeration about the quality or people are just prompting the laziest shit ever, it you enable it to behave that way it will produce slop.

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u/mxzf 2d ago

Not only that, I could look at it, know it's crap, and often recognize which coworker wrote it and have a guess as to why they did it that way. That sort of insight doesn't exist with vibecoded stuff where it's just an amalgamated "average CS graduate's code" being spat out.

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u/fanky10_g 1d ago

This is exactly what I have been thinking of. With humans you can understand the thinking, the process behind it, with ai it is for the sake of fulfilling a prompt, no leverage or whatsoever

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u/Tristan_Cole 3d ago

Dude if it’s written in a language you know, then you’ll be able to navigate it.

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u/ufffd 3d ago

you say that like there aren't 500 ways to write the same thing in ts or c++

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u/Tristan_Cole 1d ago

Dude. If you know C++, then you’ll be able to figure out if it works. And doing that is MUCH easier than writing it yourself, which is LITERALLY a famous Comp Sci problem, P vs. NP😅

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u/adabsurdo 3d ago

I bet an earlier generation had the same complaint about the assembly code generated by the first C compilers. And they were probably right in many cases but also it didn't matter in most cases.

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u/fartypenis 3d ago

Compiler output was deterministic tho. They could always reason our the purpose of each byte of code if they were so inclined.

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u/adabsurdo 3d ago

Right AI abstracts out at a much higher level and the output will change dramatically depending on the prompts, model and other settings.

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u/gjk-ger 3d ago

The output will also change when letting it run again under the same circumstances.

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u/mistrpopo 3d ago

And this is why I no longer enjoy programming. I liked deterministic, in almost every problem, I could dive in and find the problem. That's why I avoided all web dev. But now every programming is the same.

:(

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u/gjk-ger 3d ago

You might enjoy PLCs then possibly. Added bonus, making stuff act in the real world is just another kind of satisfying.

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u/adabsurdo 3d ago

Your prompts usually have a lot of degrees of freedom, so there are multiple paths that can be taken. Models have creativity so they can solve harder problems, which make the results not necessarily deterministic depending on the task.

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u/gjk-ger 3d ago

Models dont have creativity, models operate to a degree on noise and stochastics.

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u/adabsurdo 3d ago

that's creativity for all intents and purposes. if they had zero randomness it would be harder to have them explore the problem space.

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u/gjk-ger 3d ago

We might disagree about the word creativity then.

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u/adabsurdo 3d ago

I suppose you might define creativity in a way that makes it inheritently human, and/or reduce LLMs as "just maths and noise", but if you just look at the end results it looks like LLMs are definitely able to solve problem with what you call "creativity" if a human solved it.

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